“‘What do you want?’ says she; for you see Miss Sphyxy ain’t no ways tender to the men.
“‘I want to see Miss Asphyxia Smith,’ says he, very civil; thinking she was the hired gal.
“‘I ‘m Miss Asphyxia Smith,’ says she. ‘What do you want o’ me?’
“Parson Kendall, he jest took one good look on her, from top to toe. ‘Nothin’,’ says he, and turned right round and went down the steps like lightnin’.
“The way she banged that ‘ere door, Sol said, was lively. He jumped into his shay, and I tell you his old hoss was waked up for once. The way that ‘ere old shay spun and bounced was a sight. And when he come to Oldtown, Parson Lothrop was walkin’ out in his wig and cocked hat and ruffles, as serene as a pictur, and he took off his hat to him as handsome as a gentleman could; but Parson Kendall, he driv right by and never bowed. He was awful riled, Parson Kendall was; but he could n’t say nothin’, ‘cause he ‘d got all he asked for. But the story got out, and Sol and the men heard it, and you ‘d a thought they ‘d never be done laughin’ about it. Sol says, if he was to be hung for it the next minute, he never can help laughin’ when he thinks how kind o’ scared little Parson Kendall looked when Miss Asphyxia ‘peared to him on the doorstep.”
“Well, well, well,” said Uncle Eliakim, “If we are going to Dench house to-morrow morning, you must all be up early for I mean to be off by daylight; and we ‘d better all go to bed.” With which remark he fluttered out of the kitchen.
“‘Liakim ‘ll be along here by ten o’clock to-morrow,” said my grandfather, quietly. “I don’t suppose he ‘s promised more than forty people to do something for them to-morrow morning.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Lois, “and the linch-pins of the wagon are probably lost, and the tire of the wheels sprung; but he ‘ll be up before daylight, and maybe get along some time in the forenoon.”
CHAPTER XVII.
THE VISIT TO THE HAUNTED HOUSE.
MY story now approaches a point in which I am soon to meet and begin to feel the force of a train of circumstances which ruled and shaped my whole life. That I had been hitherto a somewhat exceptional child may perhaps have been made apparent in the incidents I have narrated. I was not, in fact, in the least like what an average healthy boy ought to be. My brother Bill was exactly that, and nothing more. He was a good, growing, well-limbed, comfortably disposed animal, reasonably docile, and capable, under fair government, of being made to go exactly in any paths his elders chose to mark out for him.
It had been settled, the night after my father’s funeral, that my Uncle Jacob was to have him for a farm-boy, to work in the summer on the farm, and to pick up his education as he might at the district school in the winter season; and thus my mother was relieved of the burden of his support, and Aunt Lois of his superfluous activity in our home department. To me the loss was a small one; for except a very slight sympathy of souls in the matter of fish-hooks and popguns, there was scarcely a single feeling that we had in common. I had a perfect passion for books, and he had a solid and well-pronounced horror of them, which seems to belong to the nature of a growing boy. I could read, as by a kind of preternatural instinct, as soon as I could walk; and reading was with me at ten years a devouring passion. No matter what the book was that was left in my vicinity, I read it as by an irresistible fascination. To be sure, I preferred stories, history, and lively narrative, where such material was to be had; but the passion for reading was like hunger, – it must be fed, and, in the absence of palatable food, preyed upon what it could find. So it came to pass that theological tracts, treatises on agriculture, old sermons, – anything, in short, that could be raked out of the barrels and boxes in my grandfather’s garret, – would hold me absorbed in some shady nook of the house when I ought to have been out playing as a proper boy should. I did not, of course, understand the half of what I read, and miscalled the words to myself in a way that would have been laughable had anybody heard me but the strange, unknown sounds stimulated vague and dreamy images in my mind, which were continually seething, changing, and interweaving, like fog-wreaths by moonlight, and formed a phantasmagoria in which I took a quaint and solemn delight.
But there was one peculiarity of my childhood which I have hesitated with an odd sort of reluctance to speak of, and yet which so powerfully influenced and determined my life, and that of all with whom I was connected, that it must find some place here. I was, as I said, dreamy and imaginative, with a mind full of vague yearnings. But beside that, through an extreme delicacy of nervous organization; my childish steps were surrounded by a species of vision or apparition so clear and distinct that I often found great difficulty in discriminating between the forms of real life and these shifting shapes, that had every appearance of reality, except that they dissolved at the touch. All my favorite haunts had their particular shapes and forms, which it afforded me infinite amusement to watch in their varying movements.
Particularly at night, after I had gone to bed and the candle was removed from my room, the whole atmosphere around my bed seemed like that which Raphael has shadowed forth around his Madonna San Sisto, – a palpitating crowd of faces and forms changing in dim and gliding quietude. I have often wondered whether any personal experience similar to mine suggested to the artist this living background to his picture. For the most part, these phantasms were agreeable to me, and filled me with a dreamy delight. Sometimes distinct scenes or visions would rise before my mind, in which I seemed to look far beyond the walls of the house, and to see things passing wherein were several actors. I remember one of these, which I saw very often, representing a venerable old white-headed man playing on a violin. He was always accompanied by a tall, majestic woman, dressed in a strange, outlandish costume, in which I particularly remarked a high fur cap of a peculiar form. As he played, the woman appeared to dance in time to the music. Another scene which frequently presented itself to my eyes was that of a green meadow by the side of a lake of very calm water. From a grove on one side of the lake would issue a miniature form of a woman clothed in white, with a wide golden girdle around her waist, and long, black hair hanging down to her middle, which she constantly smoothed down with both her hands with a gentle, rhythmical movement, as she approached me. At a certain point of approach, she always turned her back, and began a rapid retreat into the grove; and invariably as she turned there appeared behind her the image of a little misshapen dwarf, who pattered after her with ridiculous movements which always made me laugh. Night after night, during a certain year of my life, this pantomime never failed to follow the extinguishment of the candle, and it was to me a never-failing source of delight. One thing was peculiar about these forms, – they appeared to cause a vibration of the great central nerves of the body, as when a harp-string is struck. So I could feel in myself the jar of the dwarf’s pattering feet, the soft, rhythmic movement of the little woman stroking down her long hair, the vibrations of the violin, and the steps of the dancing old woman. Nobody knew of this still and hidden world of pleasure which was thus nightly open to me. My mother used often to wonder, when, hours after she put me to bed, she would find me lying perfectly quiet, with my eyes widely and calmly open. Once or twice I undertook to tell her what I saw, but was hushed up with, “Nonsense, child! there has n’t been anybody in the room; you should n’t talk so.”
The one thing that was held above all things sacred and inviolable in a child’s education in those old Puritan days was to form habits of truth. Every statement received an immediate and unceremonious sifting, and anything that looked in the least like a departure from actual verity was met with prompt and stringent discouragement. When my mother repeated before Aunt Lois some of my strange sayings, she was met with the downright declaration: “That child will be an awful liar, Susy, if you don’t keep a strict lookout on him. Don’t you let him tell you any stories like that.”
So I early learned silence; but my own confidence in the reality of my secondary world was not a whit diminished. Like
Galileo, who said, “It does move, nevertheless,” so I, when I once had the candle out at night, snapped my fingers mentally at Aunt Lois, and enjoyed my vision.
One peculiarity of these appearances was that certain of them seemed like a sort of genii loci, – shapes belonging to certain places. The apparition of the fairy woman with the golden girdle only appeared in a certain room where I slept one year, and which had across one of its corners a sort of closet called a buffet. From this buffet the vision took its rise, and when my parents moved to another house it never appeared again.
A similar event in my shadow-world had marked our coming to my grandmother’s to live. The old violin-player and his wife had for a long time been my nightly entertainers; but the first night after we were established in the apartment given up to our use by Aunt Lois, I saw them enter as they usually did, seeming to come right through the wall of the room. They, however, surveyed the apartment with a sort of confused, discontented movement, and seemed to talk to each other with their backs to me; finally I heard the old woman say, “We can’t stay here,” and immediately I saw them passing through the wall of the house. I saw after them as clearly as if the wall had dissolved and given my eyes the vision of all out of doors. They went to my grandfather’s wood-pile and looked irresolutely round; finally they mounted on the pile, and seemed to sink gradually through it and disappear, and I never saw them afterwards.
But another of the companions of my solitude was more constant to me. This was the form of a young boy of about my own age, who for a year past had frequently come to me at night, and seemed to look lovingly upon me, and with whom I used to have a sort of social communion, without words, in a manner which seemed to me far more perfect than human language. I thought to him, and in return I received silent demonstrations of sympathy and fellowship from him. I called him Harvey, and used, as I lay looking in his face, mentally to tell him many things about the books I read, the games I played, and the childish joys and griefs I had; and in return he seemed to express affection and sympathy by a strange communication, as lovers sometimes talk to each other by distant glances.
Attendant on all these exceptional experiences, perhaps resulting from them, was a peculiar manner of viewing the human beings by whom I was surrounded. It is common now-a-days to speak of the sphere or emanation that surrounds a person. To my childish mind there was a vivid perception of something of this nature with regard to every one whom I approached. There were people for whom I had a violent and instinctive aversion, whose presence in the room gave me a pain so positive that it seemed almost physical, and others, again, to whom I was strongly attracted, and whose presence near me filled me with agreeable sensations, of which I could give no very definite account. For this reason, I suppose, the judgments which different people formed concerning me varied extremely. Miss Mehitable, for example, by whom I was strongly attracted, thought me one of the most amiable of boys; while my poor Aunt Lois was certain I was one of the most trying children that ever were born.
My poor mother! I surely loved her, and yet her deficient vital force, her continual sadness and discouragement, acted on my nerves as a constant weight and distress, against which I blindly and instinctively struggled; while Aunt Lois’s very footstep on the stair seemed to rouse every nerve of combativeness in my little body into a state of bristling tension. I remember that when I was about six or sever years old I had the scarlet-fever, and Aunt Lois, who was a most rampant and energetic sick-nurse, undertook to watch with me; but my cries and resistance were so terrible that I was thought to be going deranged. Finally the matter was adjusted by Sam Lawson’s offering to take the place, upon which I became perfectly tranquil, and resigned myself into his hands with the greatest composure and decorum. Sam was to me, during my childhood, a guide, philosopher, and friend. The lazy, easy, indefinite atmosphere of being that surrounded him was to me like the haze of Indian summer over a landscape, and I delighted to bask in it. Nothing about him was any more fixed than the wavering shadows of clouds; he was a boundless world of narrative and dreamy suggestion, tending to no point and having no end, and in it I delighted. Sam, besides, had a partiality for all those haunts in which I took pleasure. Near our house was the old town burying-ground, where reposed the bones of generations of Indian sachems, elders, pastors, and teachers, converted from the wild forests, who, Christianized and churched, died in the faith, and were gathered into Christian burial. On its green hillocks I loved to sit and watch and dream long after sundown or moonrise, and fancy I saw bands of wavering shapes, and hope that some one out of the crowd might have a smile of recognition or spiritual word for me.
My mother and grandmother and Aunt Lois were horror-stricken by such propensities, indicating neither more nor less than indefinite coughs and colds, with early death in the rear; and however much in the way a little boy always seemed in those times in the active paths of his elders, yet it was still esteemed a primary duty to keep him in the world. “Horace, what do you go and sit in the graveyard for?” would my grandmother say. “I should think you ‘d be ‘fraid something would ‘pear to you.”
“I want something to appear, grandmother.”
“Pshaw, pshaw! No, you don’t. What do you want to be so odd for? Don’t you ever say such things.”
Sam, however, was willing to aid and abet me in strolling and lounging anywhere and at any hour, and lent a willing ear to my tales of what I saw, and had in his capacious wallet a pendent story or a spiritual precedent for anything that I could mention.
On this night, after he had left me, I went to bed with my mind full of the haunted house, and all that was to be hoped or feared from its exploration. Whether this was the cause or not, the result was that Harvey appeared nearer and more friendly than ever; and he held by his hand another boy, whose figure appeared to me like a faintly discerned form in a mist. Sometimes the mist seemed to waver and part, and I caught indistinct glimpses of bright yellow curls and clear blue eyes, and then Harvey smiled and shook his head. When he began to disappear, he said to me, “Good by”; and I felt an inward assurance that he was about to leave me. I said my “Good by” aloud, and stretched out my hands.
“Why Horace, Horace!” said my mother, waking suddenly at the sound of my voice, – “Horace, wake up; you ‘ve been dreaming.”
I had not even been asleep, but I did not tell her so, and turning over, as I usually did when the curtain fell over my dreamland, I was soon asleep. I was wide awake with the earliest peep of dawn the next morning, and had finished dressing myself before my mother awoke.
Ours was an early household, and the brisk tap of Aunt Lois’s footsteps, and the rattling of chairs and dishes in the kitchen, showed that breakfast was in active preparation.
My grandfather’s prediction with regard to my Uncle Eliakim proved only too correct. The fact was, that the poor man lived always in the whirl of a perfect Maelstrom of promises and engagements, which were constantly converging towards every hour of his unoccupied time. His old wagon and horse both felt the effects of such incessant activity, and such deficient care and attention as were consequent upon it, and were at all times in a state of dilapidation. Therefore it was that the next morning nine, ten, and eleven o’clock appeared, and no Uncle Eliakim.
Sam Lawson had for more than two hours been seated in an expectant attitude on our doorstep; but as the sun shone warm, and he had a large mug of cider between his hands, he appeared to enjoy his mind with great equanimity.
Aunt Lois moved about the house with an air and manner of sharp contempt, which exhibited itself even in the way she did her household tasks. She put down plates as if she despised them, and laid sticks of wood on the fire with defiant thumps, as much as to say that she knew some things that had got to be in time and place if others were not; but she spake no word.
Aunt Lois, as I have often said before, was a good Christian, and held it her duty to govern her tongue. True, she said many sharp and bitter things; but nobody but herself and her God knew
how many more she would have said had she not reined herself up in conscientious silence. But never was there a woman whose silence could express more contempt and displeasure than hers. You could feel it in the air about you, though she never said a word. You could feel it in the rustle of her dress, in the tap of her heels over the floor, in the occasional flash of her sharp, black eye. She was like a thunder-cloud whose quiet is portentous, and from which you every moment expect a flash or an explosion. This whole morning’s excursion was contrary to her mind and judgment, – an ill-advised, ill-judged, shiftless proceeding, and being entered on in a way as shiftless.
“What time do you suppose it is, mother?” she at last said to my grandmother, who was busy in her buttery.
“Massy, Lois! I dare n’t look,” called out my grandmother who was apt to fall behindhand of her desires in the amount of work she could bring to pass of a morning. “I don’t want to know.”
“Well, it ‘s eleven o’clock,” said Lois, relentlessly, “and no signs of Uncle ‘Liakim yet; and there ‘s Sam Lawson, I s’pose he ‘s going to spend the day on our doorstep.”
Sam Lawson looked after my Aunt Lois as she went out of the kitchen. “Lordy, massy, Horace, I would n’t be so kind o’ unreconciled as she is all the time for nothin’. Now I might get into a fluster ‘cause I ‘m kep’ a waitin’, but I don’t. I think it ‘s our duty to be willin’ to wait quiet till things come round; this ‘ere’s a world where things can’t be driv’, and folks must n’t set their heart on havin’ everthing come out jes’ so, ‘cause ef they do they ‘ll allers be in a stew, like Hepsy and Miss Lois there. Let ’em jest wait quiet, and things allers do come round in the end as well or better ‘n ef you worried.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 256